To “Elevate, Humanize, Christianize, Americanize”: Social Work, White Supremacy, and the Americanization Movement, 1880–1930

Abstract

Through close reading of primary sources, we analyzed social work’s role in the Americanization movement, a massive nation-building, nation-defining endeavor that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century. Although social work was a significant force in the rationalization and implementation of Americanization, its embrace of the project remains largely unknown within the field. We locate social work’s participation in the movement’s sedimentation of whiteness as the national identity and examine the ways in which this construction was applied to discrete populations: Indigenous Americans; African Americans; and immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Both settlements and charity organization societies were intimately engaged in the construction of the proper citizen: the self-sufficient, self-managing laborer/consumer, docile to the underlying logic of the industrializing nation. The ethnoracial hierarchy of the United States solidified through these endeavors continues to shape the nation and the profession’s approach to immigrants and racialized others today.